The Hindu Business Line : Career development: From Marathon to relay race

No longer can one organisation run for all its employees. It is now a chain — one may make him employable, another may give him status and esteem, and yet another may make him a leader that he always wanted to become. Career development is no longer a marathon that one organisation can always run for all its employees. It is now a relay race.

Understanding and fulfilling the career development aspirations of employees is perhaps every organisation's most serious challenge today. Existing solutions do not seem to work and new ones are not forthcoming.

Understanding this problem better will call for a multi-disciplinary approach — a bit of labour economics and some sociology for sure!

Melvin Reder in 1951, and Peter Doeringer and Michael Piore in 1971 are credited with having pioneered the concept of an Internal Labour Market. They used the term ILM to refer to the HR (personnel, those days) practices that firms set up to insulate themselves from the competitive forces of the external labour market.

Entry Points

These practices included the setting up of "ports of entry" or entry points and positions into which people were hired, typically at the lower levels and then the process of progressing people through clearly-defined career paths. It also included the practice of linking pay to a strictly established hierarchy of jobs.

The challenge that most organisations face today is that their ILM (the HR practices that they set up) is not robust enough to insulate them from the competitive forces of the external market. As a result, attrition (the symptom of this problem) is quite often mistakenly attributed solely to the manager or to pay or to other aspects of climate without regard to the larger issues surrounding this rather complex subject.

Here are some of the characteristics and implications of this weakening ILM:

Even as the economy is growing rapidly and generating abundant employment opportunities (albeit in select areas) the maximum demand is for people with ready to use job skills at relatively low cost. This translates into the 0-5 years experience group. This group therefore defies ILM the most.

Unlike in the past, organisations do not have a single port of entry. They are quite open and even keen to hire at every career level. In fact, the driver seems to be to "buy talent" and not just "make talent". Organisations want to invade and defend at the same time!

Tenure which was a "given" in the past and at the heart of all ILM practices is no longer so, especially at the "0-5-year" age group.

These have led to certain sociological implications too. Managers who were traditionally expected to "take care "of their employees, no longer want to invest in what they see as merely a transitional relationship. Bonding has become a thing of the past. Employees have also begun developing affiliation to their professions rather than to their organisations.

Strong career enablers

The one area that has been impacted the most by these changes is career development. Traditionally career development was seen as the organisation's responsibility. Such factors as reasonable tenure, growth from within and hiring at the bottom served as strong enablers of the career development process.

Organisations were able to show clear paths, manage job rotations, pass people through multiple assignments and over a period demonstrate progression. On their part, employees displayed a certain level of "delayed gratification" and trusted their organisations.

Once the enablers of career development (tenure, growth from within and single point hiring) were diluted, it became very difficult for organisations to hold on to their promise of career development.

In the absence of any emotional connect, it now seems easier for the employee to seek what he desires in the ELM than within the ILM. In many ways, your competing organisation's recruitment manager is actually playing the role of a career manager for some of your employees!

ILM VERSUS ELM

What then will it take for your ILM to compete effectively with the ELM?

For one, Managers must be sensitised to not treat talent as their private property and fail to release them for better opportunities within.

This will ensure that employees do not feel compelled to seek and obtain an opportunity outside since they may find that easier that pushing and prodding the system. It is for this reason that organisations have begun to move away from job rotations to a system of open job posting where the manager is not even required to sign off or approve the release.

Given that employees in India continue to derive "social approval" from a promotion and a title change, organisations need to liberate their thinking and make these aspects of their ILM as flexible as the ELM does, especially at junior level positions. It is of little use to uphold policy to one's peril.

Organisations will also need to be realistic about the "value proposition" that they hold out to their employees.

For example, to my mind the greatest value proposition that the BPO industry had was "employability" — the ability to take graduates with no skills and give them valuable skills, enhance their self-worth and make them employable.

Instead, many in the industry held out the value proposition of pay, career development and so on, and ended up with a disappointed workforce and a highly vulnerable ILM. Being clear about what you can and cannot offer is crucial in managing these aspirations and your ILM.

Finally, career development is no longer a marathon that one organisation can always run for all its employees.

It is now a relay race — one organisation may make him employable, another may give him the status and esteem he is looking for, and yet another may make him a leader that he always wanted to become. So, which of these are you doing?

(The author is the founder and CEO of totus consulting, a strategic HR consulting firm that designs and implements HR systems and process for organisations across diverse industries. He can be reached at ganesh@totusconsulting.com)

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